Case Study: Government IT Agency achieves 99.999% availability and seamless inline IPS protection with NETSCOUT

Government IT Agency Balances Security with High Availability

A government IT agency that manages the Ministry of Finance’s IT infrastructure and national online tax services needed to protect highly sensitive citizen data while keeping services continuously available. Preparing to deploy a McAfee inline IPS, the agency was concerned the security appliances could become a single point of failure and risk costly national downtime and reputational harm.

The agency deployed NETSCOUT nGenius packet flow switches in both redundant data centers to provide fail‑safe behavior, policy‑based latency triggers, positive/negative health checks, automated workflows, and session‑aware load balancing across two IPS systems. With two 2200‑series PFS in place the IPS rollout was flawless: automatic failover and traffic aggregation preserved availability (targeting 99.999% uptime) while maintaining effective inline security without risking network downtime.